My Poor Deserted Blog...

How can I do a blog round up this year when I barely posted here?

Well, I posted once in June. Thank you for reading my culmination address to the class of 2018. It was my most read post of the year and the only post to make my most-read all-time list.

Then, I posted to the blog three times in the last two days. I had to get my favorite books and publishing summary for 2018 out there. Then, I had to tie together two ideas that have been on my mind for the past few months: Lynell George's Image/After: Los Angeles Outside the Frame and the upcoming UTLA strike.

If you kept up with this barrage of posts, thanks so much.

I had a few other blogs in drafts. I was going to write about teachers and gun-violence and the ridiculousness of arming teachers, but I didn't. I was going to write about my niece's journey to play division one basketball, but she got hurt, so I didn't pursue that either.

Laters, 2018, from Team Nakada-Gantt (and Jane). 

I did start editing the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit, an organization which supports women and non-binary writers submit their work into the world. A few posts that might have gone up here went there, so if you'd like to read any of those, you can find them on the Women Who Submit website.

2018 was a full year. I wrote about running my first marathon on Throwing Cookies and was able to get up to the Wellstone Center for Writers three times. My time and the space there has helped me bring three manuscripts to completion.

I will be looking for representation this year for Rice Paper Superheroes, a young adult novel that follows the Nakamura family from the Sawtelle Nihonmachi to Manzanar and back again.

Dispatches from a High School Feminist: Rising Up from Rural Oregon, is the high school memoir that will complete the Through Eyes Like Mine trilogy. I hope to release that this summer.

And finally, Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: One Family's Experience with Mental Illness has moved from poetry to prose and I will be looking for a publisher for that as well.

After a move in August from our Mar Vista condo to a Home in View Park, we are settling in and loving our new space and neighborhood. What is on the minds in this two-teacher household most is the upcoming UTLA strike. If you have followed this blog you know my commitment to public education. This work stoppage could turn the tide for our schools, not just here in LA, but in our nation. Let's hope our city demands that our district do the right thing and fund the schools our students deserve.

With that, 2018 moves today from the front window and into the rear-view mirror. Happy New Year, y'all.

Reading LA: After/Image by Lynell George and the Upcoming Teacher Strike

I have had Lynell George's book After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, sitting on my coffee table since I read it this summer and we moved to our new house in South LA.

It's a perfect coffee table book. It's pages contain gorgeous images of our city, but the essays also draw you in, make you ignore dinner party guests around you and demand that you enter their world. Then, upon looking up, these words help start a conversation about gentrification or displacement or neighborhood politics.

That is what this book did for me as I packed up our condo of 12 years and made a move from one LA neighborhood to another. 

George’s writing illuminates Los Angeles in many of the complex ways I have come to love and hate this city. It is about the beauty you have to look inside cracks and through buildings to see. It is about the change in this city that comes from power and money and in the name of development and not from the people, the community, the history of this place. 

Last year Colson Whitehead’s quote, “Be kind to everyone, make art, and fight the power” helped me through the year. This year the quote ringing in my ears is from Lynell George:

“How do you protect not just a neighborhood’s unique character, but the people and their imprint, their story, and their struggle. [...] How do you want to contribute to the story of the city? How do you want to influence and shape history?”

As much as moving and this book got me thinking about the history of our city, I couldn't help think about how much of LA's history is tied up in our schools. Los Angeles public schools are some of the only structures that have managed to hold their ground, to refuse to be uprooted and demand the city evolve around them. I teach with teachers who attended my school. I teach kids whose parents went there. And my school, which opened in 1939, isn't even close to one of the oldest public schools in our city. 

But as the teachers of LA ready for a strike, as our public schools endure yet another attack from privatizers, these historical spaces are at risk. Holding onto our communities is about our homes and our streets and our schools. The work educators and public education advocates are doing to save schools that have struggled to serve our neediest students shows their willingness to shape and influence LA's story. 

As we head into the new year, I urge my Angeleno neighbors to read After/Image. Ask yourself some of its hard questions, and then stand with our schools, our city and all of its people this winter. 

The story of our schools and our city waits to be told. What will we say? 

Publishing Round-Up for 2018

I have been committed to building to emerging over the past couple of years. With the help of Women Who Submit, I'm still submitting (although not as often as I did last year). Here is a summary of the work that found homes this past year.

"Why I Read Books by Women of Color"

I subscribe to My Lit Box, a wonderful company that curates beautiful book boxes with titles by women of color and other literary goodies. They also have a blog and published this essay, "Why I Read Books By Women of Color."

I also took on the role of column editor for Women Who Submit's "Breathe and Push" column which explores tough times and how artists can continue to create. The following essays appeared there:

"Learning to Breath and Push Through the Darkness" is an introduction to the column and explores civil rights advocate Valarie Kaur's of breathing and pushing.  

"Finding Light in Stephon Clark's Name" looks at current activist movements to help find light during dark times. 

"When Survivors Speak. Who Will Listen?" recalls my classroom's visit with Holocaust survivors and connects to the current global refugee crisis. 

"Moving In LA: Before and After" is all think or write about as my family moved from Mar Vista to Park View Heights this past summer.  

"Why LAUSD Teachers Might Strike" speaks to what writers and teachers all over LA are grappling with as the nations second largest school district braces for a teacher strike. This essay will also be reprinted in United Teacher, the UTLA monthly publication. 

Long ago, when LAUSD was laying off teachers en masse and imposing austerity measures our public schools continue to work within, I participated in civil disobedience in protest of these district decisions. This essay, "Education in Resistance" is about that day and it appeared this past winter in Entropy. 

I tried to find a home for this flash essay about the summer of my brother's hospitalization for a couple of years and it finally found a home with Thread. "Swing" is excerpted from Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop, a memoir about my family's struggles with mental illness.  

This essay, "Late Night Phone Calls", also from Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop, was published in the Santa Fe Writers Project's summer issue. 

The rest of this year was about poems. "Sacrifice" appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review's Disarm issue which focused on poems addressing gun violence. 

"Not Your Job"

"Gaps"  and "Marbles" were also published at The Rising Phoenix Review. These poems are part of a chapbook I worked on this past April about my father's life including his experience being incarcerated during World War II. Both of these poems touch on that experience. 

Queen Mob's Tea House published "Caged" a poem about children seeking asylum being held in inhumane conditions. 

Finally, Mutha Magazine published this little poem about my little girl. "Not Your Job" after Caitlyn Siehl

Thanks to all of you for reading along this year and to the wonderful editors I had the chance to work with. Here's to another year of emerging!

My Top 13 Books of 2018

I didn't read all that much this year, but here are my top if you are looking for titles to add to your to-read list:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Ng creates worlds and characters so beautifully, and the plot of this one left me in awe. This book had me reading to find out why Izzy, really, the least developed of the characters, burns the family house down. Ng handles issues like abortion and transracial adoption so deftly and makes photography and the art of creation a beautiful commitment. The themes of carefully curated lives and communities held up against nomadic, untethered living caused me to reflect on the life I’ve created for myself and my family.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

This beautiful illustrated memoir begins in the raw space of the birth of the author’s daughter. In these early moments of parenthood, the author poses new questions and seeks understandings of her parents who came of age during the Vietnam conflict. It spans decades and renders beautifully historical times and places and portrays characters complete with flaws and tenderness.

When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrice Khan Cullors and Asha Bandele

This memoir about the politicization of a young Black woman growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the middle of the war on drugs left me breathless. The accounts of police brutality and targeting of her family showed the absolute privilege my family has had as we have grappled with mental illness. Her refuge in a public school, however, did give me hope and reinforced the role that educators can play in providing spaces where young people can learn about their oppression and how they might begin to fight back. In order to survive and fight for her family, Patrice had no other choice than to fight back.

Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

This novel in verse captures a high school sophomore finding her voice in a city and family that feel they own her. Through close relationships with friends, her brother, and a first love, Xiomara learns about the power of speaking her truth. That is what helps her discover her place and access her agency. This book won the National Book Award for YA lit. 

Simon and the Homosapien Agenda by Becky Albertolli

Loved this YA high school love-story/mystery which explores coming out and falling in love from the pov of Simon, a young, mostly closeted drama kid. The use of tech and how social media storms rage in these social settings makes me so glad I’m not growing up today. A wonderful read for kids of any sexual orientation to make some sense of the unique scenarios LGTBQ kids experience and must navigate.

Mean by Myriam Gurba

I first encountered Myriam as a poet, and this memoir captures her same sensibility: beauty and tragedy accompanied by unapologetic humor. She will look you right in the eye and say something because it is exactly what she thinks. Her accounts of abuse and rape haunt and explore survival and guilt and make sense of the messed up ways people treat one another. Her multiracial perspective and queer identity illuminate a perspective uniquely her own. 

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

This little book tells the familiar tale of Japanese American removal and internment with haunting and intimate detail. The unnamed family and main characters navigate a strange world without their father. There are so many lovely moves and small moments that bring this historic period to life.

Hunger by Roxane Gay

The vignettes and fragments that make up Gay’s memoir of her body reveal just how profoundly sexual violence can impact a survivor. Gay’s use of repetition effectively captures how little time we really spend reflecting on our bodies and the prejudice and abuse the morbidly obese face. I thought a great deal about my mom and her battles with her body and all she hungered for while reading these essays.

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

Nic Stone's story shows a young Black high school boy navigating a world where even his best intentions can be misread by police. It explores police brutality, class, and race through Justyce’s school year with a little speech and debate thrown in. Complex relationships with his best friend, his mother, his speech and debate partner/love interest, and the white boys at school weave a compelling story and his letters to Dr. King give voice to Justyce’s view of the world in all of its injustice.

A Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

This novel in verse explores violence and grief through a single elevator ride. The voices and choices that this young man faces after the murder of his brother confront him at every stop from the top to the bottom floor. The ending is masterful.

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater

This nonfiction work reads like a novel and tells the story of Sasha and Richard, two Oakland teenagers who are brought together by a high-profile hate crime. The story reveals how both Richard, the perpetrator, and Sasha, the victim, are recover from a devastating incident on the bus. Explorations of gender fluidity and the criminal justice system show how changes in the way we handle crime and punishment can serve our communities.

To All the Boys I Ever Loved Before by Jenny Han

This fun YA book explores the teenage love and innocence of a young half-Korean girl. Being raised by her white father after her mother passes, Lara Jean and her two sisters navigate growing up and falling in love.

Culmination Address for the Class of 2018

Each year I write an original oratory in the style of a graduation speech for my students. Here is this year's version. 

What Will You Do Now? 

Now: a family car ride. 

Yesterday, I was stuck in traffic. You know what that’s like. I was trying to get my kids home from swim lessons after a long day. We were tired and traffic was West LA-horrific. I was seeking out some magic path to get us home a little faster while Gabe screamed from the back seat, “Go, cars, go!” and Kiara complained about “Too many people.” I was anxious to get us home, but took a deep breath, knowing we would have to wait it out. I could’ve complained along with them, honked the horn, or continued to find another way. Or we could sing along to “Un Poco Loco” with the windows down. We could do our best to enjoy the drive.

Time is a strange thing. I remember when you all were in the sixth grade. You were smaller then, and your eyes hadn’t yet seen many of the things they’ve seen now. The world seemed different, then: a little bit simpler, a little less divided, a little less complicated.

Now, three years later, I have had the chance to teach and coach many of you, to read your stories, essays, novels and poetry, and you have three years of learning from teachers, time with friends on field trips and in classrooms. But what will you remember most?

Author Ruth Ozeki in her novel, A Tale for the Time Being writes, “I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.”

That is what I’m thinking about today.  How we can cherish memories of middle school, or moments stuck in traffic with my young children, knowing their beauty will quickly fade away? How can we find peace in the moment and still hold our memories close?

Ozeki also writes, “In the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.” Now. Now. Now. Three moments just passed from now to then, and with each breath, each now, our lives are transformed into memories.

In all of these nows, how can we make the most of our lives? Do we procrastinate by playing video games or scrolling through an endless Instagram feed? Do we go for a run, shoot a few extra shots, rehearse that speech a couple more times? Do we put finishing touches on a project before it is due or buckle down to study for a test?

The answer: I don’t know. That is up to you. Your nows, all of the moments of your life, are yours. Hopefully you used a few of those nows to think about who you are, what you believe and love, and what truly makes you happy. Not what pleases your parents or teachers or friends, but what will you give you joy in the end.

Steve Jobs says, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

I hope that is something you spend your nows doing, because that is something I have learned from all of you. I love the Class of 2018 because you come from so many different perspectives, so many different experiences and there is no way I could tell any of you how to live your lives. The only life I can live is my own.

Charles Bukowski says, “Your life is your life/know it while you have it./You are marvelous/the gods wait to delight in you.”

Blog Round-Up for 2017

It's been quite a year, and I think most of us saw it coming. With the election of 2016 in the rear-view,  what could we expect but chaos and trauma, injustice and ignorance? There was plenty of all of that, but there were also doses of hope and many galvanized souls against a common enemy. I blogged about some of that despair and some of that hope. Thanks to all who read along. Here is 2017 in review.

This is my sixteenth post of the year on this blog, plus I posted another four on Throwing Cookies, so 20 posts for the year is four short of my goal, but not too bad.

Many of my blog posts are still about my life as a teacher, and my third most read blog post this year, "Still Learning..." was about a moment when I questioned the work I do. A special group

of students helped me remember why I love what I do. Many of these same students came to our ESA signing day and have come back to visit this winter after their first few months at college (four of them at Oregon!). Watching them come into their own as young adults is another reward of this profession.

My second most-read post came this summer, in the wake of white-supremacist actions. In "Help me, please," I asked for help explaining our world to my kids, my students, and my nieces and nephews.

"On the 75th Anniversary of the Executive Order 9066" I told the story of my father's family as they and so many other West Coast Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. These words and pictures captured a little of the toll this injustice had on the Nakadas.

These three posts have become the fourth, fifth, and sixth most read blogs ever and I appreciate all the reads and shares. And with 2017 behind us, lets hope for more justice and hope in the days to come.

My Year in Books

Ugh! I've been putting off this post hoping to finish a couple more titles, but the hours in the year are dwindling, so here it is. My favorite read this year were: Another Brooklyn, Citizen, Posada, March, and Homegoing, but really each book on this list was a worthy read. It was a good year in books. Here are annotations of the 22 books I read in 2018:

Everything, Everything by Niccola Yoon

Loved the happy surprise of a narrator who is half-Japanese, half-black. Her bubble-girl scenario makes for an interesting scenario and poses the question: is it easier to keep our girls locked away, hidden in rooms and towers than to subject them to the germs, the unknowns, the evils of the world? The writing and plot isn’t as strong as The Sun Is also a Star which blew me away from cover to cover, but I enjoyed this book and look forward to seeing how this comes to the screen (although the mom is supposed to be the Asian one).

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

This novel, about a girl growing up in the grief of losing their mother, losing the south, nearly losing her brother, searching for her father, and finding her place beside other girls, is a beautiful tribute to girl hood. She navigates adolescence, womanhood, a world teeming with sexual violence and drug abuse, friendship, religion, race, class and creative spirit. I loved spending time with these girls, and these pages do illuminate another Brooklyn.

March, Book One, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

This nonfiction graphic novel teaches us so very much about how to tell a story. Flashing between the inauguration of President Obama and the early days of John Lewis the child, the young man, and the college-student and activist. An excellent reminder of all the organizing and work that led to SNCC and the civil rights movement.

March, Book Two, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

Book two moves forward from John Lewis’s work as a student volunteer to a SNCC organizer building on the momentum of the March on Washington into the Sit-Ins in the South, and the failed March at Selma where Lewis is badly beaten.

March, Book Three, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

Book three takes on the work for voting rights, voter registration, and the Voting Rights Act. This seems so timely as voter suppression is on the rise after the Supreme Court weakened the act in 2013. This final book captures the heroic march from Selma: exhausting, heroic, and ultimately successful. The pages that spoke to me most clearly were the ones depicting the role teachers had in bringing public support for the sit-ins. This powerful trilogy demands we ask: what are we doing for the movement?

Posada by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

These poems show us our city and our country at the southern border where lives are lost and found, sucked dry and resurrected. Bermejo’s poems cut to the bone and demand you to bear witness, to see the lives that are hidden in the desert brush. She demands we look not only at the streets where we drive, but at the cactus alongside the road and to remember the land, and the people, where we have built our country and have erected borders to keep them out. A powerful and important work.

The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward

A modern response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this collection of essays captures today’s Black writers on the experience of being Black in America. There is coming to terms with our racist past, adjusting to Blackness in America rather than in Jamaica, and the unrelenting violence Black America must live with and the rest of America must work to resolve

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

This YA novel tells the story of Starr Carter, who witnesses the murder of her childhood friend by a white cop on the streets of New York. Watching this young protagonist exist in two worlds, her Black community where her father owns a corner store, and her private school life mimics the code switching so many of our students must do when they come to school each day. I love how this young girl finds her voice in the midst of political and personal chaos.

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

A novel with shifting POV surrounding a murder similar to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, helps illuminate the misunderstandings of eye-witnesses. These many voices of his sister, the girl who stayed with him in his final moments, and the many other survivors he left behind, reveal all that informs how we choose to see the world.  

 

Turning Japanese by Mari Naomi

This graphic novel captures a time and experience I’m very familiar with. From wanting to get in touch with her Japanese-ness with a trip to Japan, to struggling with dating men with yellow fever, I could relate with many of the author’s experiences.

Homegoing By Yaa Gyasi

A story that arches across oceans and families, telling the story of two half-sisters, their different lives and the lives of generations to come. So many of these stories will haunt me: dreams of fire, seeking freedom and losing your young son, the long-stretching curse of those who dealt in human lives, the castle and those kept beneath it, the human impact of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the incarceration of so many innocents to float an economy of privilege. A beautiful resolution in water and salt and lineage separated by so many years and lives.

Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

This book is so filled with grief and tragedy, but also triumph in the ways each member of the family struggles to survive. These kids all try to be there for Mama, for Poppy who can’t be there for them, and for one another in a world that can be so harsh, to brutal, so damaging. This book helped remind me of all that I’ve learned from this author about how to remains to your story, characters, and voice.

Citizen by Claudia Rankin

This book is a thought, a dream, a meditation on what it is to be Black in America. It looks in the eye of “narrative structure” and says, you don’t see me? Why should I honor you? The sections on Serena Williams illuminate so much of the constant burden it is to bear being the other, the unvalued, the invisible. Every slight holds that weight and these pages hold it so very well.

The Whetting Stone by Taylor Mali

This poetry chapbook blew me away. The way it handles loss and grief and mental illness is so tender and beautiful. He manages to work in light moments, although others are devastating. It is truly to voice of a survivor who will always wonder what they could have done to help prevent a lover one’s suicide.

Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamar Hill

This book is so thoroughly researched and thoroughly depressing. I don’t know that I’m the book’s audience, as someone who already acknowledges the bleak world Black Americans occupy, but this book provides so much historical perspective and statistical analysis that the arguments seem inarguable. But will it change any minds? Will anyone who sees the world from a conservative point of view read or buy any of this news that counters all of the FOX News?

This Side of Home by Renée Watson

This author went through Jeff and grew up in Portland, so I’d been wanting to read her YA books for a while. I love how she tackles the gentrification taking place in Portland and the interracial relationship her protagonist falls into. There is also a great anti-reform education rant as she tackles public school issues as well. The plot works well, keeps me turning the pages, although I wonder about how things will work out at Spelman or for her friend at Beauty School. I think that’s the sign of a good narrative. I care about her characters.

Overdue Apologies by Noriko Nakada

A close read and edit of this seemed in order before diving into the high school memoir. Yes, it’s revising, but it’s also reading, so I’m giving myself credit for my own book. I still cringe at certain scenes, but with each read I forgive myself a little more for the girl I once was. It captures what it is to be a middle school student: longing to fit-in, dreaming of the future, and living in the chaos of every moment.

Solo by Kwame Alexander

Using lyrics and a setting of privilege, unexpected news sends Blade on a journey to find himself and love. Music creates interesting rhythms in this novel in verse and a trip overseas provides interesting perspectives of first world problems.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamiko

This book recently topped the banned book week list so, of course, I had to check it out. It’s a beautifully drawn musing on a summer when her parents are fighting, her mother seems to be battling depression, and the teenagers in this coastal town struggle with adult decisions and problems.

Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris

Woah, do I see a lot of this as a public school teacher. I love how this book made me think of the skills Black girls and women have needed to survive in our culture, and how our schools devalue these skills over and over again. Girls who push back, we push out. I will never see the angry Black girl in the same way. She isn’t a problem, she is a survivor and a freedom fighter.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I think I know something about slavery, or escaping from slavery, or what it must have been like, and then I read a book like this and the humanity of the experience, the horror and the humanity, are illuminated all over again.

Begin with a Failed Body by Natalie J. Graham

These poems could only be consumed in small doses. I like to pick up poetry collections to help read more at the end of the year, but Graham’s words demand small bites. I had to savor each poem, let them settle before moving on to the next. I love how she plays with formal and informal language, and her sense of place (although I’ve never been to the South) breathes in each line.